Posted
by
ScuttleMonkey
on Friday February 20, 2009 @03:02PM
from the make-the-bad-man-stop dept.

An anonymous reader writes to mention that Mark Shuttleworth has announced the next release in the horribly alliterative Ubuntu family, "Karmic Koala." The new version hopes to include a newer, shinier, faster startup, better small screen support, a spruced-up desktop look (no more brown), and many minor tweaks and updates. "A newborn Koala spends about six months in the family before it heads off into the wild alone. Sounds about perfect for an Ubuntu release
plan! I'm looking forward to seeing many of you in Barcelona, and before
that, at a Jaunty release party. Till then, cheers."

I've always been fascinated how the Debian (and derivatives) releases have functioned. Each branch is like a chamber in a revolver; as it reaches 'stable', it aligns itself with the barrel ready to be fired off to the masses.

I've always been fascinated how the Debian (and derivatives) releases have functioned. Each branch is like a car in a merge ramp; as it reaches 'stable', it speeds up and aligns itself with the other cars on the road ready to be released on the information superhighway.

I've always been fascinated how the Debian (and derivatives) releases have functioned. Each branch is like a snake in a box in the storage area of a plane; as it reaches 'stable', it escapes from the box and kills people on the plane.

(And then I assume some agent of the FBI/ATF/CIA/NSA/KFC kills the snake and is the reluctant hero).

I've always been fascinated how the Debian (and derivatives) releases have functioned. Each branch is like a chamber in a revolver; as it reaches 'stable', it aligns itself with the barrel ready to be fired off to the masses.

Indeed. Also, apt-get is like a giant inflatable bouncy castle for starfish that swing into port, get wasted, screw our women, and then abandon them as they're lured away again by the call of the sea.

Seriously, I know what you meant, and agree. But the flowery language only obscured y

I've got 6 Ubuntu systems at home, I have to change the themes or I can't remember what system I'm on all the time. Yes, there are other ways, but I find changing the theme/background etc. makes it easiest to remember which system I'm dealing with. I do this at work too. Using a custom background is most useful, though I vary themes by general function of the system.

I do, but am not always in the shell, so the background/theme remind me vividly. Some years ago, I removed a directory tree from the wrong Solaris system, and have modified the command prompt ever since. I do not yet know the command line for everything that I do know in the GUI. Between Solaris, CentOS, Fedora, OpenSolaris, Ubuntu, Puppy, DSL, Vista, and now NetBSD it is difficult to keep everything in my head all the time. Just the 'find' command is enough to fill your brainbox for an afternoon, never mi

I find that it's easy on the eyes without being outright drab, but maybe that's just me.

Look up drab in the dictionary, and you'll find a screenshot of an Ubuntu desktop running the Human theme.;)

Seriously, I love Ubuntu. My license plate says "UBUNTU". (Really). But the brown color scheme sucks. The only brown color scheme I've ever liked at all is the one from the original and GTK2 versions of the 'Gorilla' theme from Ximian Gnome. The one from the Ubuntu Human theme is putrid.

One of the first things I do when I install a new Ubuntu system is to change the default theme to 'Clearloo

Oddly I was just thinking about this last night. Men tend to like colors at the blue end of the spectrum. Women like the red end of the spectrum. The orange/brown scheme for ubuntu may be more attractive for much of the general population, while mostly male geeks dislike it.

For me, I just select a different theme and put on my own background image. Most of us have a few thousand of those sitting around these days.

So we learn to love the colors our parents dress us in when we're babies?

Actually, my oldest seemed to prefer red when he was a baby, and my younger son prefers blue... but I think that if that's at all due to environment, it's probably because of the pjs I was wearing after they were born.;-)

Nope - I like it too, although I never would have thought I would before. As another poster said, it is surprisingly comfortable. Also, it goes well with this Penny Arcade wallpaper [penny-arcade.com].

I often wonder why is it that everybody hates the brown color scheme. Actually that's one of the things that makes me feel right at home when I have just installed an Ubuntu system. That and the drums. It kinda makes you forget that you're looking at a Gnome desktop. Of course, then you get to use it and immediately start searching for a replacement desktop. But those first five minutes are really nice.

Actually I would have preferred it if Kubuntu had picked up a similar color scheme, or at least to have an

It's 2009. Over twenty years since the original Macintosh was released. Twenty years since the fundamentals of UI element spacing, text rendering, text kerning, verticle and horizontal text alignment, colour usage...

And the latest Ubuntu, the 'gold standard' for Linux desktops, is a complete mess:

The text alignment and kerning problems are something I really can't understand. Every time I do my yearly 'let's give Linux a try again' it is depressing to see the same horrible font choices, text that is never properly aligned in text boxes, and kerning problems.

It's like trying to put out a newspaper or magazine that doesn't have any real professional page layout people working on it. It is so jarring to read that it really doesn't matter what the actual content is.

Please, file bugs with specific examples. You are probably right: the people of that particular profession are not on the dev team and the devs that are working on Ubuntu probably don't even _know_ what they are doing wrong. Better yet, file it at Redhat or Novell, where the cashflow to hire the right people exists (Canonical won't do it).

I've noticed a lot (A LOT) of problems along these lines, and it really gets to me (I suspect that the metrics for a lot of the fonts that are distributed with Ubuntu are completely off)... but how do I categorize and report the bug in such a way that it's useful? Take a screencap of a website that uses a specific font that looks terrible? Is that a bug in Firefox, Cairo, the font itself, Ubuntu, or what?

If you file it in Launchpad, then the devs will assign it to the proper component. Definitely include a screenshot. Is the problem only in websites? Link to the bug here and I'll triage it (I use Kubuntu, though, but I can install an Ubuntu virtual machine).

The Ubuntu bug tracker is great for iffy bugs because the competency level of Ubuntu users is assumed to be rather low. However, sometimes (and I hope that this won't be the case with this bug) the devs cry "opinion" and don't work on the bug. But the whole fonts thing is well enough known that they may appreciate the input from someone who does know a bit on the subject.

Bugs filed with Ubuntu are routinely ignored. There is a huge drive for forward movement, new features, but almost no emphasis on cleaning up the myriad bugs. Why should I waste my time reporting bugs if Canonical isn't putting resources into resolving them?

That's why I mentioned Novell and Redhat as two places to file bugs will they will be solved, and not ignored. If you can cite specific examples, I will happily help get the bugs filed at the right places.

Some of these issues are real some of the time, but nearly all of your post just sounds like you're complaining that things aren't exactly the same as what you're used to.

The latest Ubuntu works beautifully for anyone who actually wants to get stuff done rather than complaining that the "open file" dialog doesn't automatically grow when you change your font size preference or whatever.

Not your call, not my call, not anyone's call. Programmers are free to work on what they're interested in doing. Distributions tend to pick sane defaults, and there's no need to complain about having other options.

Can we please get rid of the nag message if you try to login as root?

Who cares? If you're really an expert and know better, turn the message o

And you say this as a Mac user, using an OS that doesn't even have a unified package management system (And no,.pkg files don't count, since they aren't unified and there's no built-in update of uninstall mechanism)?

Your post should have been marked troll, flamebait or Macfanboi, and I say that as a Mac user myself who owns three Macs.

...they're finally getting a new theme?
Seriously, of all the things to mention in the summary, you focus on the not-brown?
There's a page long rant about cloud computing, about the eucalyptus project, and why the release is named koala. And you mention that, like every release, there's talk of it possibly not being brown?

So... when will I be able to use multiple displays without having two separate X sessions? You can't drag things between sessions so that approach is useless, and I don't want one virtual display where everything full screen is kicked between the two either. I want two screens. Is that so hard? It's part of the reason i rarely use ubuntu at home!-taylor

What _is_ nice to see is the focus on computers with limited screen space. I suppose that this will only apply to the Gnome based Ubuntu, as Kubuntu is stuck with KDE, which is "not interested" in having optional windows configurations that fit on "vertically challenged" screens:https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=169043 [kde.org]

Even the Mozilla apps have this option, and it is one of the reasons that I use Thunderbird and Firefox over the otherwise terrific Kmail and the getting-there Konqueror.

... is that it scatters its seeds by explosion, into the remains of a forest fire (which it promotes via its extremely flammable sap and the tinder pile of leaves and shed bark it creates around itself - apparently "in the hope of" getting the fire started B-) ). A row of eucalyptus trees during a fire can become the equivalent of a walking artillery barrage targeting a fuel dump.

So I certainly wouldn't want to compute on a eucalyptus cluster - even if it is a "cloud" floating far away (like over the Berkeley Hills - high enough to be visible from I5 north of Sacramento). I'd worry about it taking out the data center and my data with it and "distributing" it up to the tropopause and onward with the prevailing wind.

As for my laptop, no WAY I'll install any eucalyptus package on that. It's got enough problem with those lithium batteries with the energy density of a hand grenade without adding something more with the energy density of napalm.

The real name is 9.10. Slashdot is the most depressing when a new Ubuntu release is being announced. It's all about the color brown and names, like in fucking kindergarten. "Oooh it's the color of shit, hahahahahaaa". Yeah, and the color of chocolate, the soil we live off, etc.

All the while there are exciting technical news in the announcements, but discussion about that is drowned by the morons. Fuck off, seriously.

You should consider changing the pack of twats you hang around with, or just be happy they actually use it, and educate them gently.
Or you might want to hang around with Apple evangelists and get frustrated by their belief that Apple invented The Mouse, or with MS evangelists who think Ballmer was the first one to practice chair-throwing as an alternative form of stress relief.

The ones I can't stand are those linux users who look down at Ubuntu because it is actually easy to use and offers the advantages o

Actually, I think the only Linux users who are irked by Ubuntu's popularity are probably younger people who think they're 133t by using something more difficult. Those of us who are "old" (is 23 old?) are more likely to be uninterested in Ubuntu only because we already know our own distros and the workings of a Unix system in general. Most of us oldies are too chill to waste time talking down Ubuntu. Look to your own peers for irrational Ubuntu-bashing.